One size fits all? An analysis of the international student’s journey through the UK higher education system

The Commission on International
Student Destinations was
established in 2013, following the
Office for National Statistics’ earlier
announcement that migration figures
were to be disaggregated with
student inflow and outflow reported
separately.

The aim of the commission is to enhance understanding
of the journeys that international (non-EEA) students
at UK higher education institutions (HEIs) take. This
includes consideration of their activities pre-enrolment
and post-graduation. Advice to the commission was
provided by representatives from Universities UK
(UUK), the Home Office, the Office for National
Statistics (ONS), the Higher Education Statistics Agency
(HESA), the Department for Business, Innovation &
Skills (BIS), vice-chancellors and HEI representatives
with a responsibility for international students within
their own institution.

The commission’s remit originally focused on the
evidence base surrounding numbers of international
higher education students departing from the UK within
a given year, including the International Passenger
Survey (IPS). In doing so, this could enhance the crosschecking
of student inflows and outflows. However,
its remit was widened to examine and evaluate the
available evidence on international students’ wider
migration patterns; their ‘journey through the UK
education system’.

The commission has not considered in detail statistics
relating to students other than those in higher education.

Evidence and data relating to migration into and out
of the UK are collated by several bodies, including
government departments. Despite the emergence
of new data sources and welcome improvements to
existing ones, it is nonetheless clear that some key
gaps remain in the evidence base around student
migration. If addressed, these could greatly inform the
broader debate around immigration. The limitations
of immigration statistics have been well articulated
in recent years, and by various groups, including
parliamentary select committees
, the Migration
Advisory Committee
and the UK Statistics Authority
which, in 2013, suggested that, at that time, the
official ‘estimation of emigration (including overseas
students returning home…) is particularly problematic
and contributes to substantial uncertainty in the net
migration estimates for the UK and locally’
.

The commission met three times in total, with research
taking place between meetings. As well as analysing
official data releases from HESA, the Home Office and
the ONS, the commission investigated what alternative
sources of information might already be kept by HEIs
themselves (as well as other education providers) that
could assist in filling some of these gaps.

The commission noted the following:

International students follow a range of different
pathways through the UK education system,
which affects the duration of their stay.

Various agencies collate data on international
students, but are often not referring to the
same cohorts of migrants, making it difficult to
draw firm conclusions about their numbers.

There is a wider range of data available on
students entering the country compared to
numbers leaving, which has implications
for the measurement of net migration.

There is little uniformity in the way higher
education institutions collate information on
their international entrants or alumni, although
such data could enhance our understanding
of student destinations after graduation.

In light of this analysis, the commission
recommends that:

The Department for Business, Innovation
& Skills should work with those education
providers not included within HESA’s records
to address the data gap between HEI student
numbers and others. Commission members
should encourage such providers to engage
with data provision in order to inform the debate
about international student pathways.

UUK should work with a selection of HEIs to identify
the proportion of non-EU student enrolments that
require a visa to come to the UK.

UUK should consider repeating its 2011 analysis of
HESA data into progression rates and identify trends
by students’ country of domicile.

The Home Office should publish its data on
in-country visa extensions by previous category
annually (as standard).

HESA should consider developing an action plan
to increase Destinations of Leavers from Higher
Education (DLHE) survey response rates for non-EU
students in future years, and UUK should
produce case studies to analyse what a high
response rate to the DLHE might reveal about
non-EU student behaviour post-graduation.

The IPS could helpfully include a question
about former students’ level of study, in order to
disaggregate those leaving the country who were in
higher education versus other education providers.

A more sophisticated methodology should
be established to consider the various data
sources and develop an anticipated outflow
figure for international higher education
students subject to immigration control.

Dialogue between data groups established through
this commission should be maintained, perhaps
through the existing Migration Statistics User Forum,
to facilitate a greater level of information sharing
between organisations to allow coherent analysis
and linking together of international student data.